A boy and his grandfather cross a language and cultural barrier using their shared love of art, storytelling, and fantasy.

Starting out as a wordless picture book, you meet a boy and his grandfather. They seem to have nothing in common until they boy gets bored and pulls out his art supplies. Then a whole new world opens up as the boy draws and the grandpa draws, building “a new world that even words can’t describe.”

Sami’s Syrian town is bombed and his family flees to a refugee camp. They have to walk night and day and night again before they get to the tents of the refugee camp. There they remain while Sami struggles with his emotions and continuously fearful for his pet pigeons, which his father says escaped the bombed city.

Read to find how Sami deals with his inner turmoil as he and his family lives at the refugee camp.

From the book jacket: Hee Jun’s family moves from Korea to West Virginia. He struggles to adjust to his new home, where none of his classmates look like him and he can’t understand anything the teacher says — even when she speaks s-l-o-w-l-y and loudly to him. Little by little Hee Jun begins to learn English and make friends. One day, when he is invited to a friend’s house for the first time, he sees a flower he recognizes from his grandmother’s garden in Korea: mugunghwa, or rose of Sharon, as his friend tells him it’s called in America. He brings a shoot to his grandmother, who plants the “piece of home” in their new garden.

This picture book is a perfect read aloud for any teacher who has an ELL student in his/her classroom. The words and pictures describe the struggles the students (Hee Jun and his sister Se Ra) have at school while adjusting to America.

It opens the readers’ eyes to the fact that just because someone doesn’t know English does not mean that they were not well respected in their home country. In this book, grandmother, is a well-respected teacher, regarded as a “wise and wonderful teacher” and she stands proud with her “shoulders erect.” But when she is in America she knows no English, has no job, and “she does not hold her shoulders erect and her eyes don’t gleam — not at all.” The illustrations perfectly depict these stark differences in emotions.

Use this book in a compare/contrast lesson with Eve Bunting’s One Green Apple.

Well, the author of Take Away the A has a new book in his series: Where’s the BaBOOn? It encourages students to put together the red letters to solve the riddle on each page. For example, the riddle reads “Who brought an apple?” The illustration shows the arm of an ape giving the teacher the apple. Students put together the letters a – p – e and the clue from the illustration to know it is the APE that gives the apple. Each page is one riddle after another.